Though agriculture is the main livelihood for most Kenyans, more than 75 percent of the country’s agricultural outputs are still produced by smallholder farmers on small plots of land using traditional technologies—and mainly for consumption rather than sale.

As the largest among the fast-growing economies of Africa, Nigeria is a promising market for mobile financial services. More than 80 percent of adults have access to a mobile phone and a sizeable number (64 percent) own their phones.

Smallholder farmers in Africa, Asia and Latin America face many challenges, including little or no access to quality inputs (e.g., seeds and fertilizer), insufficient information about farming "best practices", market prices and weather and limited access to markets and few financial resources. This makes it extremely difficult to increase t

These studies aim to understand how mobile phone technology and its usability is impacting poor women’s ability to access and benefit from mobile financial services. Many players assume that if a poor person owns a mobile phone, they are able to use it. We have found that this is a faulty assumption, and believe that usability and “mobile phone literacy” are big issues that are preventing poor women in particular to benefit from mobile-enabled solutions.

Many of the world’s toughest problems, including persistent poverty, are rooted in individual behavior. Behavioral economics and more specifically the emerging practice of behavioral design offer powerful tools to solve these social problems at large scale. Behavioral design applies insights from decades of academic research in behavioral economics and behavioral psychology to develop low-cost interventions with large effects.

Grameen Foundation announces the release of the operational overview report of Easypaisa, the largest branchless banking service in Pakistan. The report, commissioned by Grameen Foundation via the South Asian Micro-Finance Network (SAMN), identifies key factors that have enabled Easypaisa’s success.

This report—based on a representative state-wide study of microfinance in Karnataka, India—demonstrates that it is possible and necessary for the microfinance sector to measure and understand itself through a strongly and consistently pro-poor lens and make decisions based on this.